In recent years, IPTV has received an increasing amount of interest from the industry, commercial providers and the research community, alike. In this context, standardization bodies, such as ETSI and ITU-T, are specifying the architecture of IPTV systems based on IP multicast. An interesting alternative to support the IPTV service delivery relies on the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) paradigm to distribut...

It is absolutely essential to implement advanced IP network technologies such as QoS, Multicast, High Availability, and Security in order to provide real-time services like IPTV via IP backbone network. In reality, the existing commercial networks of internet service providers are subject to certain technical difficulties and limitations in embodying those technologies. On-going research effort...

IPTV services should use an IP multicast solution for a network bandwidth efficient delivery of the media contents. PIM-SM is the most commonly used IP multicast routing protocol in IPTV systems. A short introduction to the operation of PIM-SM is given. Its fault tolerance is examined by experimenting on a mesh topology multicast test network built up by XORP routers in a virtualized environmen...

This paper aims at the delivery of adaptive and personalized multimedia content in interactive IPTV environments, using programmable IP services through the MPEG-21 standard, supporting also features for users with disabilities. Moreover, we propose a system that adapts to users’ preferences using profile separation, not only for individual users but also for user groups as a whole. The system ...

The usage of Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) deployments in the consumer electronics market is growing very popular in recent years. In IPTV multicast systems, quality of experience is a very critical factor for user satisfaction. Existing and future IPTV systems will offer a large number of channels to users. The most important factors that affect the quality of experience in IPTV systems are chan...

P2P IPTV applications arise on the Internet and will be massively used in the future. It is expected that P2P IPTV will contribute to increase the overall Internet traffic. In this context, it is important to measure the impact of P2P IPTV on the networks and to characterize this traffic. During the 2006 FIFA World Cup, we performed an extensive measurement campaign. We measured network traffic...

In the past few years there has been an increasing trend towards personalization in the TV world. IMS-based IPTV is a good example of a highly personalized IPTV architecture, featuring an advanced identity management subsystem. This article studies a next step in the personalization of the television experience: concurrent use of TV services that are supported by the IMSbased IPTV system. That ...